An update to my prior post‘s numbers on memory consumption: it seems a large chunk of the apparent increase in GNOME Shell’s memory usage in Fedora 20 is, somehow, related to the fact that I tested in a VM. Testing on metal does not reproduce the same numbers: I see 173MB for Shell in top, only slightly higher than F19’s 160MB in a VM. I haven’t yet tried F19 on metal, but I will.

So far the theory is this is due to llvmpipe-based software rendering of the Shell being used in the VM. F19 was already using llvmpipe, so this would mean there must have been some kind of change in its memory use or memory use accounting between F19 and F20, but the situation does seem to be more complicated than just ‘Shell uses a ton more memory in F20 than F19’.

Many thanks to Jasper St. Pierre and Matthias Clasen for guiding me through a closer investigation of this, and our work has already borne some fruit: I also did some valgrind profiling, and that led to Jasper finding some issues with desktop background loading that should save 12MB or so in my test configuration.

I’ll keep on poking at this if I can find time, but right now work on F20 is taking priority. Unfortunately, it’s looking a bit like we may have to slip the Final release by a week, but we’ll make the final decision on Thursday…

11 Responses

Nice follow-up indeed; I don’t have too much trouble with initial memory, but gnome-shell still leaks quite a bit for me in 3.10. After a week or so of running, I need a alt+f2 -> r to bring back sanity.

With every new Fedora release, we discover that new features are welcome, but come with a cost. I have Fedora 20 installed on 3 differently sized computers, from 1 gig, 3.5 gigs, and 8 gigs of memory. The Nov 5th beta on the 1 gig Netbook runs well. I can multi-task with that F20 version beta and this older netbook. I do compiling, web browsing and even concurrent yum updating and response is pretty good.

What is the cost? It is the reduction in the small residual amount of free memory on my Netbook to avoid Linux using swap file space. Fortunately, this is not an issue for other two systems, my 3.5 gig and 8 gig systems.

And by the way, compile times on my Atom netbook with F20 is eye blinking fast. GCC 4.8.2 is fast and it allows me to do full system recompiles in a little more than the blink of an eye.

I do expect the final F20 release to have an even smaller footprint, as the extra debugging code introduced during beta testing will not be included. I have been waiting for final F20 for my Christmas gift.

Hey, i am currently experiencing that issue on a fresh Fedora 20 installation using GNOME shell. I have hybrid graphics but It`s not using llvmpipe, only the integrated card is activated (the Intel one). The discrete card (radeon) is disabled.

At this time the gnome-shell process is using something about 700 MB of memory and i`m only using firefox with 1 active tab.

rbarbosafl: how long’s Shell been running, and do you have any plugins? there are a few memory leak issues in Shell at present, and more with some plugins, it seems. does it use that much right at startup time?

Hello, i don’t have any plugins installed. I am still using the system as it’s installed (i don’t changed nothing, the wallpaper is still the same for example :p). At startup it’s using something about 300 MB of RAM but after a few usage minutes, it’s reaching 800~1 GB. It’s really annoying.